I posted a reaction to reading this game recently, and somehow I've also actually played the thing! I've debated posting about it though, as I was quite high on the game from reading it, but really struggled with it in practice, but I'll get into why.
It's tough to explain my issues, as they're mainly mechanical, so bear with me as I cover some of the basics to give context. In the game, you have essentially two character sheets, one for your human, and one for your ship. Each one has six attributes, using a stepped dice system. So when you roll a check, 1-2 is a failure, 3-4 is success with a cost, 5-6 is a success. But you may be rolling a d4, d6, d8 etc depending on the attribute.
Every time you roll a check on an attribute, you reduce the die size of that attribute by one. So if your character starts with Shoot at d8, when you shoot it drops to d6, then if you shoot again it drops to d4. If your attribute is at d4 it cannot drop further, so instead you mark a stress on your character sheet.
Your have four boxes to fill in for stress. When you fill in the fourth, you mark a despair box. There are 15 despair boxes, and filling in all 15 ends the game.
You can take an action to 'lay low' and remove one stress. There's no explanation of when and how often you can do this, I assumed once per jump. You can also take an action to 'catch your breath', which restores your character's attributes to full. Your ship attributes seemingly cannot be restored at all.
Each time you jump to another system, you roll on a flight table. This is 2d6 and on a 10-12 you're safe. That's 17% of the time, so 83% of the time, you are making an engine check. Engines are one of your ship attributes, so in 83% of jumps, you are reducing your engine attribute by one. This very rapidly drops to d4 and triggers a stress every time you have to make the check.
The next step after your flight roll is a sensors check. This is another ship attribute, and the check is performed on 100% of jumps, so even more rapidly drops to d4 and triggers a stress every time you jump, without fail.
As noted, you have four stress boxes to fill in, and can lay low once per jump (admittedly the once per jump is an assumption on my part, because no parameters are established around it). This means on 83% of jumps, you are checking 2 stress and can only clear 1, so very soon you are triggering a despair on every jump. This is all before you even know what is in the system and decide whether to disembark and deal with the obstacles planetside.
In fairness, the game is about you being the last human alive, so perhaps this is all intended to support the bleak nature of the game. I had expected melancholic though, and this ends up feeling more like the first time you play Dark Souls.
Combat was also confusing, as enemies will be listed to do, for example, a "standard attack", but the impact of that is not defined. You don't have HP, so my assumption is that an attack causes you stress (especially since it uses heart shapes for the boxes). This makes the most sense, but ramps up that stress collection even more. One enemy has an ability that says "You suffer 1 harm in addition to any triggered consequences", but I have no idea what 1 harm means, it's not a term I can see used anywhere else in the book. Again, I assume it means an additional stress, but I'm really not sure.
One last point. Your ship has 24 'resources', split equally between rations, fuel, shield, and structure. A lot of the game is structured around the push and pull of these resources. The cost for failure or partial success will often be losing resources, you can regularly be boarded by pirates who will take a lot of resources, and the most common reward for actions is also resources. However, once I was in a downward spiral of despair, and hesitant to land in any system because everything I did would cause more stress and despair, I ran out of resources entirely, and realised that ... nothing happened. There's nothing to say what happens if you run out of resources, and they're completely disconnected from the stress/hope/despair system.
It was a shame that this didn't play as well in practice as it read. Additionally, it felt clunky as a solo journalling game, because the procedure has you making a flight check, engine check, sensor check, system scan, location check, and further rolls on tables to determine possible rewards. This is all before you decide whether to go planetside. At first I tried to journal through each roll, but subsequent rolls can introduce elements that don't gel well with your established fiction. So I ended up going through all of those rolls, then surveying the output and crafting a narrative that fit all of the pieces. It works ok, but felt disjointed.
I should caveat all of this with the possibility that I'm entirely an idiot and just read the rules wrong in multiple ways. That's definitely possible! It did occur to me while writing this though, that it's based on the Breathless system, which I've looked up and originally powered a survival-horror group TTRPG about zombies. This definitely has more of a survival-horror vibe, mechanically. By default, that system also only has the one character sheet, no ship with permanently decayed attributes causing continual stress. This also explains the disconnect of the resource mechanic, which is brand new to cyan starlight. By virtue of being a group game, and also the context of the zombie setup, the pacing is much different and makes sense of 'catching your breath' and 'laying low', which confused me when I spend most of my time alone on a ship. There's also a 'stunt' mechanic which gives you a d12 once per 'catch your breath', which is entirely missing here.
Seemingly every change from Breathless to cyan starlight makes it more punishing, to the extent that (for me at least) it feels brutal more so than it is melancholic.
